Learn Chinese in 5 Minutes: The real deal in 3 easy steps

Learn Chinese in 5 minutes is possible if you focus on one thing at a time. We designed quizzes to help you learn: read, type, repeat. If it’s your first time learning Chinese, give it a shot. You can’t lose anything here! Worst case: You remembered something in Chinese.

Learn Chinese in 5 minutes: How it works

There are only 3 steps:

Step 1: You listen to a sentence and see how the sentence is written (in the alphabet).

Step 2: You type in the same sentence in Chinese, in separate words. We call it decoding.

Step 3: You repeatedly type in, this time, in whole sentences.

Learn Chinese in 5 minutes: The real deal

Now you can simply start here with the first quiz to learn the Chinese grammar.

If this was fun and useful to you, you can finish the entire grammar lesson here:

What about the Chinese characters?

After you remembered the pinyin (alphabet) combination, you can type in Chinese using the alphabet combination you learned. Google pinyin input or anything you installed in your phone or pc will suggest, in most cases, the entire sentence correctly.

However, this doesn’t mean you don’t need to remember the characters anymore. On the contrary, I think it’s essential that you remember them, now that you only need to recognize them. Before people started using Chinese with the input system, people needed to learn the strikes. But today, if you are pragmatic, this is no longer necessary. The mandatory part, however, is still memorizing the characters.

That way, you can recognize these characters and know what they mean. Only then can you say you can speak, understand, AND read in Chinese. For that purpose, you need the second step: the character quizzes. But this is only possible if you have finished the first part: Remembering the combination of the alphabets. Only after you finished that part, it makes sense to start with the character part.

Learn Chinese in 5 minutes – Meme

Have you seen memes like this before? The first time I saw this, I burst into tears – I know, this is one of those jokes that only the Chinese can laugh about, but let’s put it aside for a while. First, I think we can all agree that it is funny, so relax and laugh a bit.

Now on a more serious note: If you have read my post about the Chinese Alphabet, you would know why this is wrong. And when I say this is wrong, I don’t mean it’s politically incorrect. I’m saying this is literally incorrect.

The mistakes are that there are too many combinations that don’t exist in Chinese. The Learn Chinese in 5 Minutes picture shows many words ending with m, which is the first mistake: No vocabulary in Chinese ends with m. Similarly, words also don’t end with k, t, or h. Another mistake worth mentioning here are combinations such as ching or kin, king. They might sound Chinese to you, but they don’t exist in the Chinese language either.